Thunder In Her Body (49 page)

Aaron flew in the next day to tie up any loose legal ends, and provide Jane with her check.  She had benefit of a private hospital suite until she was ready to leave, and after that a private company provided her with visiting nurse services and a daily housekeeper for two weeks.  She was strong and healthy, and went back to classes six days after her delivery.  In every way, she upheld her part of the bargain, and they did the same.  The proud parents sent her flowers for a month and offered her a trip to the ranch, but she declined.  It was all business with her.  Blaze Christopher was theirs to keep forever and ever.  This was their baby – born from Lynette’s egg and her husband’s sperm.  It was not an adopted baby; it was not a child of Lynette’s egg and an anonymous donor; it was not a child of Blaze’s sperm and another woman.  This was their child.  The only difference is that Lynette did not have to lie on that table and push her son out into the world.  He was blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh.

There was no “hand-me-down” sentimental crib stored somewhere from the birth of their other children.  Those cribs had long since been given away and probably were no longer even in existence, it had been so long ago.  They moved the new crib they’d bought before the baby was born, into their bedroom.  All through the night Blaze would get up and look down at the little fellow.  He’d touch his tiny fingers or brush against his pajama-covered toes.  They slept with a tiny night light, and sometimes when Lynette came back from the bathroom, Blaze had taken over her side of the bed and was laying watching his son in the quasi-darkness.

One night, he took the baby out of his crib and propped him up on his stomach.  Lynette stretched out next to them and just watched the way he held his son.

“My son.  My son,” he said to Lynette.  He looked over at her and said, “Thank you, my wife.  Thank you.”

Because she wondered, she asked him.

“What if the baby had been a girl?  Would it have mattered?”

“You know my heart.  Knowing me as you do, what do you think Dear Wife?” he asked back, shaking his head at her.

“I think you would lay here and say ‘My daughter, my daughter’, with the same amount of pride and joy,” she replied.

“Then you do know me well,” he said, rubbing her leg.  “A son or a daughter will carry our blood into at least the 7
th
generation.  That is our task,” he smiled in such a contented way.

On another night, the baby lay in between them in the bed, all snuggled up and warm. Blaze was very spontaneous with his thoughts.  He shared everything with Lynette and he liked to talk with her.  He liked to listen to her. “I don’t know how a man could be happier than I am tonight.  They reached across the little bundle and laid their arms across each other.  “I will love you into eternity for this gift,” he said to her.

Hawk and Maurice took great pleasure in teasing Blaze about becoming a father again, so deep into middle age.  Nothing they could say – nothing anyone could say – could dampen the exhilaration Blaze felt with his life.  He had a wife that he adored and who returned that adoration measure for measure, a livelihood that would take them into old age in comfort, and a son at his knee that he could raise in both worlds.  He’d teach him what it meant to be Apache, he would let Lynette teach him what it meant to have pride in his African-American heritage, and he would teach him how to survive and prosper in the white-man’s world.  He had so much to teach him, and he prayed God that he would live long enough to finish the lessons before the long sleep.

Blaze Christopher was baptized over the Thanksgiving holiday when most of the family could be there.  Trapper and Aaron served as his Godfathers and Merrilynn and Janette as his Godmothers, and his adult siblings agreed to take a hand in helping to raise him.  “He will be a strong Brave,” the Elder of the tribe pronounced.  His christening day was cause for an enormous celebration.  Blaze looked at his lovely wife, holding the blood of his blood.  The little fellow wore the white clothes of a pure and perfect child of God, the tiny African sandals of a desert wandered, and he was wrapped in an Apache blanket.

While Blaze Christopher was incubating in the surrogate’s womb, Blaze and Lynette carried the red piece of blanket, that had been his mother’s, to the Canyon de Chelly area, up near Chinle, Arizona where some famous Navajo rug weavers turned out amazing pieces of rug and blanket art.  One female, a juried artist, agreed to build the piece of red cloth into a full blanket.  It became the center of the creation, bounded on all sides with colors of red, yellow, black, green and white.  The blanket was slightly larger than the typical baby’s blanket bought at a modern store.  It was big and warm and soft.  Now the red piece would belong to another generation of the Apache blood.  Blaze vowed that he would share the history of that red piece with their son, as soon as he was old enough to understand its significance.  Just in case, he told the entire assembled group during the baptism, what that piece of ancient red cloth symbolized.  He did not want its importance to ever be lost.  Once the ceremony ended, Lynette folded the precious blanket, handed it to Blaze, who placed it in a special acid-free box, and stored it away in his closet.  It would be saved for another generation;  one that would understand and appreciate its significance.

The
Third Annual Snowdown Thanksgiving Banquet
turned out to be almost as big as the wedding of Blaze Christopher’s parents.

C
HAPTER 33

¤

The Ensuing Years

W
hen Lynette left her former marriage, no one could’ve convinced her that there was this kind of happiness in one place, in the entire world.  She had known pain, betrayal, rage, confusion, anger, displacement and an entire range of miseries before, during, and after her marriage to her first husband.  Now, all that was wiped away.  It seemed like something she’d read in a bad novel, or seen in a B-rated movie.  It couldn’t have been her life, because she was living her life now – living it the way it should be.

Each day that Blaze rolled over next to her and said, “Good morning wife,” was the continuation of an enchanted life.  He called her wife, because that meant more to him than the name Lynette.  Lynette was the name her parents gave her shortly after her birth. 
Wife
was the supreme title he bestowed on her when he gave her his name and his life.  She called him husband often because they both liked the sound of it.  And now, he called her Mama.  She was his sacred partner, his wife, and she was the mother of his baby, so her second supreme title was Mama.

Blaze watched the way she held their son.  It was soft yet safe.  Some times Blaze Christopher reached for her breasts as though somehow he knew that they should be his personal milk chambers.  She flinched when he grabbed at her right one, because it was still tender.  It probably always would be.  But she held him close against those wonderfully full mounds, surrounding him with her loving arms.  Talking to him in silly, soft words; watching him turn his little face into one big toothless grin; nuzzling his round belly with her nose.  Blaze watched the way he laid up on her shoulder, tucking his head into her neck as he fell asleep.  He would never let anyone or anything hurt the two people he loved most in this world.  Every time he could, even in the tiniest act, he thought of a way to thank Lynette for the gift she had given him.

Blaze liked to rock him to sleep at night, even when he was restless and fretful, fighting sleep.  He’d hum a strange and haunting tune to him, and slowly, little by little, his big, bright eyes would start to close.  Blaze held him close against his chest.  Sometimes he whispered things in his ear.  Lynette particularly liked it when the baby tugged at Blaze’s hair.  She knew that had to be imprinted in his genes, because she loved to play with, stroke, and even pull her husband’s hair, especially in the throws of passion.  The baby would intertwine his tiny fingers in his daddy’s locks and then just hold on to it.  Blaze was such a beautiful man.  He gave her a beautiful baby.  He gave them all a life beyond any fantasy she ever had.  How blessed they were.

Sometimes when the baby was asleep during the bright sunlit days, Blaze would come in off the ranch, sneak Lynette off to the Great Room, or one of the guest rooms, undress her and ply her with his “magic wand” as he playfully called it.  It did work magic.  It turned a calm, gentle mother into a clawing, screaming, sweaty wench.  She uttered profanities into his ear as he rose and fell in her.  She teased him with the words of a song she’d heard,
Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy. 
And when she rode her cowboy, she rode him down to the ground.  It gave her more pleasure than she could describe to look down on him, watch his skin goose-bump, and watch the muscles around his high cheek bones contract as he ground his teeth, about to let loose the hot fury of himself.  She liked to watch and feel his involuntary movements when she brought on the flood of completion.  As with the beginning of their relationship, sometimes they needed to make strong, almost violent love; at other times, it was the gentleness of a virginal experience.  They were everything to each other.  He fulfilled her as a woman; she fulfilled him as a man.  Their’s was the way it should be.  Motherhood had done nothing to dampen the behavior of his passionate wife.  Fatherhood, with its stolen moments, had heightened his ardor for this woman that he loved so completely.

As the days passed into months, Blaze Christopher, now nicknamed “BC” grew into a chubby, active, raven-haired, inquisitive little toddler.  They took him to see his grandmother, who lived with Lynette’s sister.  Though she’d had two strokes, she was still alert enough to play with him and she loved holding him while he fell asleep.  Bertha had been a wonderful and caring mother.  Blaze could see where the foundations of Lynette’s kindness came from.  Her sisters were “firecrackers” and though they’d been at the wedding, he didn’t really get a chance to know them well.  Over the years he did, and the size of his family grew with more fun and loving people.  Lynette brought her mother to visit, for long periods of time, as was the agreement among the sisters, shortly after Bertha had the first stroke.  She watched Blaze lift the rather plump woman, as if she was light as a feather, and lay her in bed at the end of each day.  “He’s a keeper,” she told Lynette every night, in her limited way.

O
ne week after Clare retired from state government, she and Aaron were married at the country club.  It was January, and too cold for a wedding at the ranch.  Their’s was a decidedly more formal ceremony, but smaller in invited guests than Blaze and Lynette’s had been.  It was a beautiful wedding with Aaron in a dark blue suit, pale grey shirt and silver silk tie.  Clare was attired in a tea-length, ivory, fitted lace gown and satin shoes.  She chose not to wear a veil, and instead wore a platinum and diamond broach, pinned to the side of her hair.  It had been her grandmother’s.  Cherished in the family as one of the few heirlooms, Clare was happy that her oldest sister let her have it as a wedding gift.  She was radiant and Aaron was the second happiest man in the world.  Of course Lynette and Blaze stood up with them as best man and matron of honor.  The reception area was decorated in colors of peach and cream (off-white) with salmon colored roses and baby’s breath on each table.  There was a buffet meal of lamb, beef, chicken and fish with the usual side dishes of buttered potatoes, green beans, salad and a fruit compote with sherbet as the dessert.  Aaron had been quick to point out that people of their age often had strict dietary limitations, so fish and chicken would take care of those with high cholesterol and gout!!   The three tiered cake was simple and elegant, covered in off-white fondant icing and embellished with peach and creamy white flowers cascading down its sides.  And it was tasty. Lynette was delighted that there was some left over, and she and Blaze feasted on this sweet delicacy, with hot tea and coffee for days.  She knew exactly how to freeze and quick-thaw cake without drying it out.

T
he reception tables were placed in a semi-circle with a small, sparkling dance floor in the center.  The five-piece band faced the guests and did an excellent job of playing romantic and danceable music for the
over 50 crowd
well into the evening
. 
Aaron and Clare looked so happy together.  When the bride and groom finished their traditional dance, Blaze took Lynette by the hand and led her out among the guests for a dance.  He held her the way he had held her that first night back at the Hills Cafe.  And she felt that rush of arousal, as she had then.  They were careful not to be too obvious on the floor, but anyone who looked at this handsome Indian and his beautiful wife, could tell that they were an example for this new couple to follow.  Blaze looked down at Lynette with eyes spilling over with love.  And she looked up at him with worshipful gazes.

They danced often together.  When the plans for the cabin were drawn up, Blaze added and in-home stereo system, which could be accessed from different places in the home. He had some stereo guru come in and rig the unit so that he or Lynette could choose from a variety of music types; classical, easy listening, Indian flute, country n’ western,  pop, jazz – whatever they liked at the moment. If desired, there could be more than one kind of music playing around the house.  It was really nice at night when they didn’t want to watch any more television.  They could just relax in the Great Room or their bed and soothe their souls with soft, relaxing sounds.  Sometimes Blaze would just sweep her up in his arms when they passed each other in the kitchen, or the Great Room.  He would twirl her around as if she was a princess.  At other, more tender times, he’d dance with her close, slow and easy and if the mood hit him, he’d turn into her private dancer again.  They’d replicate as much as possible that first dance.  She had lost none of her sensuous moves; he sometimes unfastened his belt as they moved together.  Dancing together was an aphrodisiac for both.  They often wound up on the couch, and the massive table in a darkened dining room was definitely not off-limits!